Andrew Cockburn

Andrew Cockburn: Kill Chain. The rise of the high-tech assassins. Henry Holt and Comp.: New York 2015

1. zur Geschichte der targeted killings

1.1 political assassinations
-  originally officially banned as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy (42); but: "It's not   assassination if we do it" (73 ff) 

- 50er-Jahre: CIA plans in 1954 to eliminate "top-flight communists" in the event of a successful coup in Guatemala (84: "Manual on assassination")

- order to set up an assassination squad (coming from the National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and his deputy Walt Rostow): 84 
- "neutralizations" of Viet Cong Infrastructure (85): a quota of 800 per months as a management tool --> PRU (provincial reconnaisance teams)

- "as America withdrew from Vietnam, the assassination program was widely deemed an embarrassment, if not a war crime, and best forgotten" (88) - Public ban of political assassination by President Gerald Ford (1976), reaffirmed by Presidents Carter and Reagan: "No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassinations" (89).

- but CIA instructional manual (1983) on how officials of the Sandinista regime could be „neutralized“ (89)

1.2 high-value targets

- Hitler as the ultimate high-value target (74)
- targeting of Fidel Castro (83) 
- 1986: Reagan orders Muammar Qaddafi killed (legal rationale provided by W.Hays Parks, working for the army's judge advocate) (90): „lawful self-defense options against legitimate threats against to the national security of the United States or individual US citizens" (91).

- Sadam Hussein (passim) - kingpin strategy der DEA gegen die kolumbianischen Drogen-Barone (93ff):

         "Unveiled the year before Escobar's death under the leadership of Robert Bonner, an ambitious prosecutor appointed administrator of the agency by George Bush sr. in 1990, the 'kingpin strategy' focused on eliminating the      leadership of the major cocaine cartels, along with their key henchmen, either by death or capture" (96)

- Bin Laden (passim) - offizielle Legalisierung der high value targetted killings in George W. Bushs "Memorandum of Notification" (17.September 2001) "giving the CIA carte blanche to hunt down and kill high-value targets in the al-Qaeda leadership" (115) "Bush also approved a list of about two dozen people whom the CIA was authorized to kill or capture without further presidential review and allowed the addition of names ton that list with no permission necessary" (115). - Targeters: „A new profession of ‚targeters‘ was born. Their task was to assemble information on a future victim, his movements, associates, and habits, in ordert o set him up for a kill“.

1.3 Israels Einfluss - Praxis von "targeted extermination" (Hisul Memukad) - Euphemisierung (2001?) durch Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein: "Sikul Menukad" = targeted prevention" (116)

- Avi Dicter (2005) retiring head of Israel's internal security service: "The state of Isreal has turned targeted prevenions into an art form". Dicter war unmittelbar nach seiner Pensionierung mehrere Monate als Gastwissenschaftler an der Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. und wurde Mitautor der Schrift "Israel's Lessons for Fighting  Terrotists and their Implications for the United States"(117). Grundprinzip: "the number of effective terrorists is limited", weshalb deren Eliminierung besonders produktiv sei. 

- former senior White House counterterrorism official (interviewd von A.C.): "The idea had its origins in the drug war. So that precedent was already in the system as a shaper of our thinking... In additiom, the success of the Israeli targeted-killing strategy was a major influence on us, particularily in the and in the special Ops agency. We had a high degree of conficence in the utility of targeted killings. There was a strong sense that this was the tool to be used" (117).